Thanks for posting this. I compared this to the data we got from a random sample of the EA Facebook group myself as well. I don’t know whether your comparisons above are to our overall results or just the random sample of Facebook we did?
First points re. comparison:
Our data is slightly different from each others because you allowed people to select more than 1 place as “where you first heard about EA” whereas we allowed only 1. (We allowed more than 1 option for our “which helped get you more involved in EA question) This might skew things a bit.
-It also meant that I had to adjust your numbers a bit to be able to compare %s.
-Comparing our numbers is also quite difficult to do because our categories don’t line up. For example, nearly 40% of your responses were “Other” which didn’t come up at all in ours (mostly options with quite small numbers too).
-To make our data a bit more easily comparable I shoved a few categories together (for example, I included “colleague” and “family” in “friend”)
-Our results agree on ACE/AR being very low numbers
Comments on the actual data:
I basically agree that there were some significant differences but overall not enormous divergence.
LessWrong, as you note, is not the biggest point of divergence. (~10% vs ~20%)
-GWWC is probably the biggest difference: 14% for us and basically a complete absence for you (<1%). I don’t think that can be explained by any simple sampling bias (of the kind people posited for LW)
-Relatedly we had double the 80K responses you did.
-You had twice as many Singer responses; but our category was (TED) Singer, so I think some of our general Singer responses may have ended up in TLYCS (or Other, maybe), so our Singer+TLYC scores are pretty similar 8% v 9%.
What to make of the GWWC/CEA wipeout? (For us CEA and LW had basically equal influence, for you the ratio was 2:1 in favour of LW). I would guess the most likely explanation is timing. There was only year between our survey’s (results being published), but we were randomly sampling members of the FB group, whereas you were only asking new members. So we’d have sampled a lot of people who’re members of the group and have been EAs for a few years, whereas you are sampling solely new people. People involved in EA from close to the beginning will plausibly be much more likely to have heard of it from GWWC. New people, it seems, much less so. (Even if you include EAG and local groups and Will and Tyler personally all in CEA- which would be unreasonable anyway- the numbers don’t jump that much). So it seems plausible that CEA is much less of an influence, as a proportion, than it was in the early years. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues and is reflected in our new survey.
Thanks for posting this. I compared this to the data we got from a random sample of the EA Facebook group myself as well. I don’t know whether your comparisons above are to our overall results or just the random sample of Facebook we did?
First points re. comparison:
Our data is slightly different from each others because you allowed people to select more than 1 place as “where you first heard about EA” whereas we allowed only 1. (We allowed more than 1 option for our “which helped get you more involved in EA question) This might skew things a bit. -It also meant that I had to adjust your numbers a bit to be able to compare %s. -Comparing our numbers is also quite difficult to do because our categories don’t line up. For example, nearly 40% of your responses were “Other” which didn’t come up at all in ours (mostly options with quite small numbers too). -To make our data a bit more easily comparable I shoved a few categories together (for example, I included “colleague” and “family” in “friend”) -Our results agree on ACE/AR being very low numbers
Comments on the actual data: I basically agree that there were some significant differences but overall not enormous divergence.
LessWrong, as you note, is not the biggest point of divergence. (~10% vs ~20%) -GWWC is probably the biggest difference: 14% for us and basically a complete absence for you (<1%). I don’t think that can be explained by any simple sampling bias (of the kind people posited for LW) -Relatedly we had double the 80K responses you did. -You had twice as many Singer responses; but our category was (TED) Singer, so I think some of our general Singer responses may have ended up in TLYCS (or Other, maybe), so our Singer+TLYC scores are pretty similar 8% v 9%.
What to make of the GWWC/CEA wipeout? (For us CEA and LW had basically equal influence, for you the ratio was 2:1 in favour of LW). I would guess the most likely explanation is timing. There was only year between our survey’s (results being published), but we were randomly sampling members of the FB group, whereas you were only asking new members. So we’d have sampled a lot of people who’re members of the group and have been EAs for a few years, whereas you are sampling solely new people. People involved in EA from close to the beginning will plausibly be much more likely to have heard of it from GWWC. New people, it seems, much less so. (Even if you include EAG and local groups and Will and Tyler personally all in CEA- which would be unreasonable anyway- the numbers don’t jump that much). So it seems plausible that CEA is much less of an influence, as a proportion, than it was in the early years. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues and is reflected in our new survey.